Rand Paul: “Mr. Chairman, this amendment provides that no funds for new obligations, guarantees, or agreements can be issued under…”

“Mr. Chairman, this amendment provides that no funds for new obligations, guarantees, or agreements can be issued under the Export-Import Bank under OPIC or under the Trade Development Agency. This again is an attempt to try to slow up the amount of dollars that flow into corporations and for their benefit specifically as well as our foreign competitors. China, for instance, receives the largest amount of money from the Export-Import Bank. Outstanding liabilities for the Export-Import Bank is now $55 billion. There is $5.9 billion that have been granted to the Chinese. Last week we had a very important vote on trade. It was hotly debated over human rights issues. I voted to trade with China because I believe it is proper to trade with people. We are less likely to fight with them. And in this institution, too often we use our terms carelessly and we talk about free trade as being something which is managed trade. Free trade here generally means that we will have the NAFTA people managing trade, the World Trade Organization managing trade, and we will subsidize our businesses. Just this past week we had the World Trade Organization rule against us saying that we grant $2 billion worth of tax benefits to our own corporations and they ruled that that was illegal. This is all done in the name of free trade. I say that we should have free trade.”